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Home , Liberal democracy, Politics, Robert Filmer

ASPJ & Francophonie - 2nd Quarter 2018 ­

Rethinking Liberal Prelude to

Isabel DavID, PhD*

The Theoretical Foundations of

In the long course of and political experimentation, liberal democracy, especially after the events of 1989, has come to be seen as the best , or, at least, as put it, “the worst form of gov­ ernment, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”1 In fact, we seem to have reached the so-called end of and of all . By portraying itself as the only valid way of thinking, what this language entails is, in fact, the obliteration of alternative modes of thinking, and thus the effective dominance of this particular .The effect of this mechanics is self-evident: the persistence of one particular form of thinking self reproduces and, through repetition, generates its own . Tocqueville has brilliantly described its essence: in a democratic , where the passion for equality is the prevalent and irresistible dogma, all people have to , which means that all live in a of perpetual agitation.2 This state of affairs is simply incompatible with contem­ plation and its ultimate end—the search for truth—if by no other than that thinking requires time, something which is lacking in such . In other words, have no leisure class, precisely that which has traditionally dedicated itself to these matters. In the absence of theoretical concerns, people turn to their material well-being and live for the present, a context in which sci­ ence comes to exist not per se, but only possesses a utilitarian rationale that merely conceives of its immediate and practical application. This prevalence of the economy, of the technical sphere, and the advent of a of things, instead of a government of men, seems to be intimately con­

*Isabel David is an Assistant Professor and a Research Fellow at the Orient Institute and at the Centre for Administration and Public , School of and , of Lisbon Isabel David, “Rethinking Liberal Democracy: Prelude to totalitarianism,” Journal of and International Affairs 1, no. 1 (2015), UDC 327 - ISSN 1857-9760. Published online by the Institute for Research and European Studies – Bitola at www.e-jlia.com

41 42 ASPJ AFRICA & FRANCOPHONIE

nected with a qualitative change which took place in the 16th century, namely, the Reformation.The most important break in Western unity was especially espoused by the most economically developed areas, by those most favored by natural re­ sources and by the wealthiest towns of the Holy Roman ; in one word, by the bourgeois way of life. The emphasis on earthly salvation through work and economic , as put it, instead of after-life salvation, and the rejection of transcendentalism, seems to compose a materialistic picture duly in­ compatible with the spiritual and ascetic essence of Christianity.3 Once imple­ mented, this system tends to develop a legitimacy that increases in proportion to its stability. These “ethical maxims,”4 having penetrated the cultural realm, gave rise to an ideological foundation——traceable to the writings of , and later continued by , , , and . John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government5 were as much a reaction against Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarch6 and Stuart’s absolutism as they were a eulogy of Whig interests, associated with emergent industrial lobbies and wealthy merchants.7 Hence his fierce defense of the doctrine of unalienable natu­ ral — liberty, life, —that constituted the inviolable pri­ vate sphere of a , conceived as a domain in which there could be no state interference. The cornerstone of his theoretical edifice lay in the social com­ pact, based on consent and choice, as the means to create a body politic. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, he proposed the famous tabula rasa doc­ trine, arguing that there are no innate universal moral notions—speculative and practical principles—in the human mind.8 Rather, moral principles, along with faith and revelation, require reasoning and discourse, in order that their truth is discovered. In fact, all knowledge begins with experience, through the senses, and must be made dependent on the end one wants to achieve. Among the ideas which are received from sensation and reflection are pain and pleasure, in refer­ ence to which good and evil can be measured. Hence, that which is called good is that which is apt to cause or increase pleasure, or diminish pain. Evil, on the contrary, is that which is apt to produce or increase any pain, or diminish any pleasure in us. Happiness consists in the maximum pleasure we are capable of, and misery the maximum pain.9 Hence, principles such as virtue are generally ap­ proved, not because they are innate, but because they are profitable to each indi­ vidual. It was with Adam Smith’s The Wealth of that decisively ac­ quired its markedly economic tone.10 For him, people’s actions are guided by the utilitarian consideration of self-interest, in a supposedly well ordered competitive system, guided by an .11 Jeremy Bentham was responsible for the LIBERAL DEMOCRACY 43

doctrine of as such.12 As for Locke, for Bentham pain and pleasure are the sovereign masters which decide what we ought to do and determine right and wrong. Based on these foundations, the principle of utility “approves or disap­ proves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in ques­ tion.”13 The final goal of the system thus created is felicity, by the hands of reason and . In fact, the principle of utility, as the true source of , is aimed not only at individual action, but also at government action. The individual is the best judge of his own utility, due to man’s reasonable nature. In this sense, the art of directing a man’s own actions is named private , or art of self government and the sum of the interests of the several members who compose the forms the interest of that community.The art of directing people’s actions to hap­ piness and augmenting it through the law is called the art of government. In this context, punishment, which is an evil in itself, should only be admitted if it can exclude some greater evil. John Stuart Mill elaborated on the of utilitarianism, considering general happiness as a moral standard and the ultimate appeal on all ethical ques­ tions.14 It is anchored on the natural social feelings of mankind, and is, for that reason, the most important and desirable end. Money, fame and power are com­ ponents of happiness. Hence, the best government is that which is most conducive to . Mill mitigates this understanding of utilitarianism, by advocating the superiority of and moral pleasures, with a view to a “higher mode of existence,” reflecting the distinctive human faculty of reason.15 Here resides the justification for the absolute sphere of human in matters of lifestyle, inner consciousness, personal conduct and opinion—and hence unhindered indi­ vidualism16—in which the state has no power to intervene, even with an ethical purpose, to restore moral standards—the “ of custom,”—save in those cases where the aim is to prevent harm done to others. In his view, liberty is the only trustworthy source of improvement.Thus, each individual, bringing with him an endless diversity of experiences,is a possible independent centre of improvement. The role of the state, in this context, should be that of a central depository, circulator and diffuser of these . Immanuel Kant’s rests on an optimistic view of the human condition, based on the assumption that men are originally predisposed to good and able to perfect themselves.17 Hence, morality can be built on the postulation that man is a free agent who can bind himself through reason alone to , therefore not needing either or any other incentive than the law to apprehend and do his duty. Right and wrong are deter­ mined solely by reason. In this context, the categorical imperative is that which represents an action as necessary in and of itself, being able to ignore all ends. 44 ASPJ AFRICA & FRANCOPHONIE

There is only one categorical imperative: “Act so that the maxim of thy will can always at the same time hold good as a principle of universal legislation.”18 Thus, what each of us calls good must be desired by all rational men, which means that a universal kingdom of ends can be conceived, binding all rational beings by com­ mon laws. The final outcome will be that each one of us will treat others, in every case, as an end, and never as a means. For David Hume, knowledge comes from experience, through the senses.19 This is the case of morality, which depends on subjective perceptions and appe­ tites. Thus, good and evil can be distinguished according to the impressions they produce: if the impression is agreeable, then something is good; if, on the contrary, the impression is uneasy, we are in the presence of evil. There are, therefore, no objective moral standards. Similarly, does not exist per se, but rather arises artificially from education and human convention to remedy some inconveniences such as selfishness and lack of generosity. From then on, the pursuit of happiness— traceable to ’s —for the greater number and avoidance of pain as the only ends of human action were to be considered as the guidelines for all moral considerations, capable of defining good and evil, instead of consid­ ering an action good in and of itself.20 This view, which can be best described as a revival of sophism, has come to dominate the political and philosophical debate and was translated into , drawing mainly from the works of Fried­ rich von Hayek and . The view also gave birth to the doctrine of state neutrality that emerged in the 1970’s, which regards the liberal state as one that does not impose upon its citizens or favor any definition of the good, leaving people free to pursue their own private moral conceptions. This regression from the public sphere—the sphere of freedom par excellence— to the despotism of the household can only be looked at with great concern. In fact, when private interests take over public life and start acting as —privatizing public utilities and , marketizing health services, social and pensions, promoting between , intro­ ducing private sector forms of management into , treating citizens as clients—that is, as mere providers of goods and services, will be built “on the basis of private law” and the common good becomes a sum of private in­ terests.21 In the impossibility of “linking the ’ responsibilities and obli­ gations to a well defined political order (…), the very possibility of politics is put into question.”22 For economy, as mentions, can never decide “which form of government is better; tyranny or a free .”23 Because the two spheres, the economic and the political one, have divergent goals, and once politics is evicted by the market, democratic decisions lose credibility, given that money can be neither democratized nor held accountable,24 and citizenship is LIBERAL DEMOCRACY 45

converted into plain “ratification of decisions or consumption of services.”25 At the same time, representation fails and turn into a simple appointment of agents and delegates of interest groups. The reduction of freedom to such a “diminished ”26 conception—the economic rationality of the consumer, who has replaced the citizen—puts aside the moral component that is supposed to underlie public space, built on the idea of reciprocity associated with the cate­ gorical imperative (or with the general will) in which the citizen comes to partici­ pate on an equal basis in the , a possibility immediately denied by the market, which merely “reproduces, and augments, the comparative advantages, previously established, of enterprises, of the domestic and of people.”27 The people, by defini­ tion a public law concept, dilutes into a shapeless mass of isolated individuals in­ capable of being held accountable. For liberalism, by reducing the role of the state and by making the private sphere the only domain where freedom could be main­ tained, has shielded the citizens from the public realm. Liberal morality is reduced solely to the endeavor of preserving oneself as the first and only basis of virtue. However, as Hannah Arendt noted, “nothing proved easier to destroy than the privacy and private morality of people who thought of nothing but safeguarding their private lives.”28 Beyond Good and Evil

The that ultimately springs from , in that all opin­ ions are alike in , even wrong ones, as Mill argued,29 can best be summa­ rized in Rousseau’s volonté de tous, a sum of individual private and egoistic wills from which no general will can ever emerge.30 St. Augustine reinforces the private nature of evil, which arises when man starts focusing on the lower goods, to satisfy his egotistic interests.31 Reason cannot be the measure of morality, as Kant wanted, for, as Horkheimer and Adorno claim, “Reason is the organ of calculation, of planning; it is neutral with regard to ends; its element is coordination.”32 Nietzsche’s superman, someone capable of creating values ex-nihilo, tries to replicate Kant’s categorical imperative.33 This is the problem with : trying to create values ex-nihilo. The full implications of these doctrines are not, as a matter of fact, liberation from state tyranny, but rather from traditionally accepted and established known values, as inaugurated them—it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong—then their subversion and, finally, their destruction.34 Values thus became “social commodities that have no significance of their own but, like other com­ modities, exist only in the ever-changing relativity of social linkages and com­ merce.”35 Ultimately, this extreme mutability seems to be intimately connected 46 ASPJ AFRICA & FRANCOPHONIE

with utilitarianism, a process in a strict dialectical relation with scientism, the new religion associated with economic progress, by which has reached the end point of the eschatological interpretation of history of which spoke—the scientific or positive stage—having successfully abandoned the theo­ logical and the metaphysical stages.36 Here lies precisely the explanation for the replacement of one God by an­ other. In fact, faith in progress rests on the fact that it is more readily accessible to all, saints and sinners, and hence more egalitarian and consistent with the spirit of democratic morality. In addition, it reflects the abandonment of the uncertainty of faith in a hereafter, which may not exist, to embrace a more certain man-made world. The killing of God, the one thing that ultimately ensures the stability and immutability of all things human, comes, in this respect, as the necessary prereq­ uisite for the inversion of known values and the advent of ever-changeable sets of new ones. In fact, once God is killed, in a first stage values still exist, but not their ultimate source—call it God or —and, once their guarantor is not there any longer, those values completely disappear. In effect, what this continuous change means is that “the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth vs. falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.”37 After the killing of God, as had noticed; only customs—les mœurs, the morality of every —could prevent the moral and spiritual breakdown of Western cul­ ture.38 But, contrary to what he noticed—that the decline begins with unlawful­ ness, either when the laws are abused by the government or when the of the law’s source becomes doubtful and questionable—39 it is not the of the laws that leads to decay but rather, as noted, that corrupt mores encroach upon the laws and transform them.40 In a context in which freedom becomes a means, and not an end, and is replaced by , the arbitrariness of isolated individuals reigns supreme. Since the absolute barrier that once separated good from evil was blurred by relativism, indifference becomes the prevalent feature of democratic societies. From indifference, the leap to skepticism is only a very short one, and an even shorter one to . The attempt at a new beginning by man alone, through secularization, which has been the driving force behind all modern —all openly atheist— could only have one outcome: tyranny. The full implications of such a conception showed to what extent the demiurge—the superman of which Nietzsche spoke,41 in an attempt at imitating divine art, an apocryphal manifestation of God—hadn’t liberated himself from the political order which he ruled, but, as Locke had an­ ticipated,42 from natural, and hence, divine law, to which he had been subjected LIBERAL DEMOCRACY 47

prior to the Modern Age, having tried to create a and thus tried to find “within the political realm itself, a fully satisfactory substitute for the lost religious sanction of secular authority.”43 Modern times have indeed become a witness to the most unacceptable crossing of ethical boundaries, having reached its height in the open criminality of totalitarian regimes—it is well known that the elite formations of the Nazi party were organized after the model of criminal gangs and trained to commit mass murder, while criminals received a fairly better treatment in concentration camps than totally innocent people—but not solely confined to them. The events in former or Rwanda fully demonstrate that totalitarian solutions are here to stay and can indeed be extraordinarily popular. The Shape of Things to Come

And if moral virtues remain in us through education and habit44, as Aristotle noted, the greatest danger lies in that “no one who spent his life among rascals without knowing anybody else could have a concept of virtue,”45 when all refer­ ences have been eliminated. In the end, the last resort will be . From lack of moral standards, emerges a particular type of citizenship: apa­ thetic, passive and unenlightened46 and thus incapable of adequately choosing its representatives.This fact is particularly disturbing in a system which was meant to rely on a high degree of discernment on the part of its people. In a context in which individuals lack time and thus proper knowledge to effectively participate in the res publica, state power is bound to grow. More so when people are willing to lose their freedom, in the name of safety, as the current crisis has proved, with the rise of the far right all over . This thought is particularly troubling and aggravated in our time, marked by the “ethos” of the market and by the “transfor­ mation of the world into industry”47: The danger of the corpse factories and holes of oblivion is that today, with popu­ lations and homelessness everywhere on the increase, masses of people are con­ tinuously rendered superfluous if we continue to think of our world in utilitarian terms. Political, social and economic events everywhere are in a silent conspiracy with totalitarian instruments devised for making men superfluous. (…) Totali­ tarian solutions may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations which will come up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate 48 political, social, or economic misery in a manner worthy of man. Mass murder in the political sphere merely emulates mass production in the economic realm. People are judged by their market . Reified, people become eventually obsolete and thus disposable. As things, human beings can be used and manipulated. In this utilitarian world, ideas, , ideologies are of interest 48 ASPJ AFRICA & FRANCOPHONIE

“only insofar as they increase or decrease the survival prospects of the human species on the earth or within the universe.”49 In the end, the origins of such must reside in the utilitarian formula that obliterates meaning and pur­ pose and blurs the difference between means and ends. If “all of European history through many centuries had taught people to judge each political action by its cui bono and all political events by their particular underlying interests,”50 in the absence of values, what can be the boundaries to ? A nihilist society, however committed to science, can only have totalitarianism as its final destination. Totalitarianism, then, does not proceed from ignorance. And from this cycle there seems to be no escape: “whatever the punishment, once a specific has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.”51 There is indeed a strikingly frightening similarity between democracy and totalitarianism, in that the former paves the way for the latter.52 One only to compare the brilliant studies conducted by Tocqueville and Hannah Arendt, Democracy in America and Totalitarianism respectively, to understand the meaning of such an affirmation.53 Once the difference between right and wrong is no more54—and then we will have attained what Plato saw as the cause of evil: ignorance—men relapse into a Hobbesian since the instinct of self-preservation prevails when each one of us does what he wants,55 paving the way for the utmost perversity and fully demonstrating its consequences once such men reach government, as Plato noticed.56 The ultimate perversion is the trivialization of all feelings which en­ noble and elevate the human condition—love, friendship, loyalty. And this devel­ opment proves how easily modernity has destroyed both man’s ability to think— and especially to reflect on himself—and his practical reason,57 the one faculty on which Liberal philosophy rests, by trusting human nature. Hitler’s is the living proof—action alone determines the nature of the moral and not intention, as Aristotle noted.58

Conclusion The for the Definition of a Common Good?

When wrong actions are dismissed as normal and acceptable and even crim­ inality goes unpunished, reversing legality, as Plato noted,59 even in the eyes of intelligent people, there is usually more involved than just nonsense. There exists in our society a widespread fear of judging that has nothing whatever to do with the biblical ‘judge not, that ye be not judged.’ (…) For behind the unwillingness to judge LIBERAL DEMOCRACY 49

lurks the suspicion that no one is a free agent, and hence the that anyone 60 is responsible or could be expected to answer for what he has done. Actually, the refusal to obey the law or to render it effective finds its cause also in this attempt of man to become causa sui. The tragedy is that, ultimately, punishment has always come as the last resort to make people obey moral stan­ dards which were always thought to be self-evident; as history has shown,“natural law itself needed divine sanction to become binding for men.”61 With the loss of the “restricting limitations which protected its boundaries, freedom became help­ less, defenseless,”62 and thus ready to be destroyed. People have to be forced to be free, as Rousseau would put it. In this sense, the Christian faculty of forgiveness has no applicability in relation to the “sins” committed in the political domain. For “it is the grandeur of court proceedings that even a cog can become a person again.”63 In this context, “the boundaries of positive laws are for the political existence of man what memory is for his historical existence: the guarantee of the pre­ existence of a common world, the reality of some continuity which transcends the individual life span of each generation,”64 that is, only “in the body of positive laws of each country do the ius naturale or the Commandments of God achieve their political reality.”65 Between the strong and the weak, it is freedom that oppresses, while the law liberates66 and the role of the is that of limiting power, so that we won’t have a government of men, but a government of laws.67 Indeed, that means the rejection of the social compact on which liberalism is based for a state exists for the sake of a good life, and not for the sake of life only. (…) Whence it may be further inferred that virtue must be the care of a state which is truly so called, and not merely enjoys the name: for without this end the com­ munity becomes a mere alliance which differs only in place from alliances of which the members live apart; and law is only a convention, ‘a surety to one an­ other of justice,’as the Lycophron says, and has no real power to make the 68 citizen good and just. This presupposes a common ethical understanding of society and its values; in other words, striking an agreement about the definition of “.” In order that freedom survive, relativism cannot be condoned, especially that which, in the name of freedom, can put an end to it, under the presupposition that the responsibilities associated with government will ultimately operate a transforma­ tion on radical political elements. As history has shown, when the nature of these elements is such that it is incompatible with the respect for the rules of the , freedom will always be the weakest element, proving that it is necessary “to dis­ solve the sophistic-dialectical interpretations of politics which are all based on the 50 ASPJ AFRICA & FRANCOPHONIE

superstition that something good might result from evil,”69 for “those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.”70 Because at the basis of freedom stand moral and ethical values; freedom is not devoid of substance. Ad­ ditionally, our system of justice, our laws, our institutions, what is criminalized or not, are based on moral conceptions. Hence, a democratic government is not supposed to become an accomplice in its own overthrow by letting Gnostic movements grow prodigiously in the shelter of a muddy interpretation of civil rights; and if through inadvertence such a move­ ment has grown to the danger point of capturing existential representation by the famous legality of ‘popular elections,’ a democratic government is not supposed to bow to the ‘will of the people’ but to put down the danger by force and, if 71 necessary, to break the letter of the constitution in order to save its spirit. As Voegelin notes elsewhere, “While … might does not make right, it is unfortu­ nately equally true that it makes an order, and that without it an order can be neither created nor maintained.”72 These are issues we would like to forget because they point to the authoritarian origin of politics. In fact, the advent of totalitarian regimes seems to have inaugurated a political era of all or nothing, in which, as Arendt explains,73 all means an undetermined infinity of forms of human living together and nothing, the inevitable doom of human beings, in an ultimate con­ frontation between good and evil in which appears as catharsis, a last possibil­ ity for humanity to be born anew,74 when, having reached his lowest point, man is confronted with his bestial condition. In the impossibility of a return to God, “death is the greatest evil; and if life cannot be ordered through orientation of the soul toward a summum bonum, order will have to be motivated by fear of the sum- mum malum.”75

Notes

1. From a House of Commons speech on 11 November 1947. 2. J. P. Mayer, : Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1969), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/816/816-h/816-h.htm. 3. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of (London: Routledge, 2001). 4. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Thomas Hollis (London: A. Millar et al., 1764), http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/222. 5. Ibid. 6. Sir Robert Filmer, Patriarcha; of the Natural Power of Kings. By the Learned Sir Robert Filmer Baronet (London: Richard Chiswell, 1680), http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/221. 7. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, Vol. XXV, Part 2, The Harvard Classics (New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909-1914), http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/m/mill/john_stuart/m645o/index.html. LIBERAL DEMOCRACY 51

8. John Locke, The Works of John Locke in Nine Volumes, Vol. 1 (London: Rivington, 1824), http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/761. 9. Utilitarianism then has its true foundations in Locke. 10. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Can­ nan (London: Methuen & Co., Ltd, 1904), http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN.html. 11. Ibid. 12. Jeremy Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (: Claren­ don Press, 1907), http://www.econlib.org/library/Bentham/bnthPML.html. 13. Ibid., Chapter 1. 14. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1871), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11224/11224-h/11224-h.htm. 15. Ibid., Chapter II. 16. In On Liberty, Mill argues that liberty consists in doing what one desires and that the in­ dividual is unaccountable to society for his actions. 17. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing , Inc., 2002). 18. Ibid., book I, chapter I. 19. David Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (London: A. Millar et al., 1748), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9662/9662-h/9662-h.htm. 20. “The Internet Classics Archive | Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle,” http://classics.mit. edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.2.ii.html. 21. , Parlementarisme et démocratie (Paris: Seuil, 1988), 31. 22. Wagner quoted in, Jürgen Habermas, Après l‘État . Une nouvelle constellation politique (Paris: Fayard, 2000), 261. 23. Hannah Arendt, On (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 215. 24. Jürgen Habermas, Après l‘État nation. 25. Robert B. Hawkings Jr., “Power-Sharing and Municipal ,” in Constitutional Design and Power-Sharing in the Post-Modern Epoch, ed. Daniel J. Elazar (Lanham: University Press of America, 1991), 82. 26. Jürgen Habermas, Après l‘État nation, 97. 27. Ibid., 98. 28. Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism (New York: Harvest Books, 1968), 36. 29. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1871), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11224/11224-h/11224-h.htm. 30. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du Contrat social, dir. Pierre Burgelin (Paris : Garnier-Flammar­ ion, 1966). 31. Philip Schaff,“NPNF1-02. St. Augustine’s of God and Christian Doctrine,”in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series I, Volume 2 (Grand Rapids, MI: WM. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2005), book XII, chapter 7, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf102.iv.XII.7.html. 32. and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 69. 33. Ibid., 90. I am indebted to Horkheimer and Adorno for this equation. 34. Plato and Donald J. Zeyl, Gorgias (Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co., 1987), 469a-479e. 35. Hannah Arendt, (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 32. 52 ASPJ AFRICA & FRANCOPHONIE

36. Auguste Comte and , The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte (London: J. Chapman, 1853). 37. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 252-254. 38. Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, trans. Thomas Nugent (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1914), book XIX, chapter 16. 39. Ibid., book VIII, chapter 8. 40. “The Internet Classics Archive | The Republic by Plato,” http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/ republic.8.vii.html. 41. , On the Genealogy of Morals (Oxford: , 2008). 42. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government. 43. Arendt, , 158. 44. “Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle,” book II, chapter 1. 45. Kant quoted in Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgement (Westminster: Knopf Pub­ lishing Group, 2003), 61. 46. The relationship between morality and the improvement of citizenship was clearly per­ ceived by the Classical world, from Socrates to . 47. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 29. 48. Arendt, Totalitarianism, 157. 49. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 185. 50. Arendt, Totalitarianism, 46. 51. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Penguin Books, 2006), 273. 52. Twenty-five centuries ago, Plato noted how democracies inevitably degenerate into tyrannies. 53. Mayer, Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America and Arendt, Totalitarianism. 54. This blurring does not apply anymore, as Kant thought, when [Man] is conscious of the moral law but has nevertheless adopted into his maxim the (occasional) deviation therefrom. Im­ manuel Kant, Religion Within the Bounds of Bare Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Hackett Pub­ lishing, 2009), Book One, III, http://www.hkbu.edu.hk/~ppp/rbbr/toc.html. 55. “Abundance needs no law, and civilization’s accusation of sounds almost like a denunciation of abundance (…) it is the lack of contact between the cave dwellers which is the true reason for the absence of objective laws…” Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlighten­ ment, 50-51. 56. “The Republic by Plato,” book VIII. 57. Kant had stated that the will is the faculty of choosing only that which reason recognizes as good. 58. “Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle,” book III, chapter IV. 59. “The Republic by Plato,” book VIII. 60. Arendt, Responsibility and Judgement, 19. 61. Arendt, On Revolution, 191. 62. Hannah Arendt, “What is Authority” in Between Past and Future (New York: The Viking Press, 1961), 91-142. 63. Arendt, Responsibility and Judgement, 148. 64. Arendt, Totalitarianism, 163. 65. Ibid, 162. 66. Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire. LIBERAL DEMOCRACY 53

67. “Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle,” book V, chapter X. 68. “The Internet Classics Archive | Politics by Aristotle,” book III, http://classics.mit.edu/ Aristotle/politics.3.three.html. 69. Arendt, Totalitarianism, 140. 70. Arendt, Responsibility and Judgement, 36. 71. Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (Chicago:The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 144. 72. Eric Voegelin, Collected Works. The Nature of the Law and Related Legal Writings, vol. 27 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 86. 73. Arendt, Totalitarianism, 141. 74. Hermann Hesse, Demian (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1999). 75. Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, 182.